California, GOP in sync on reducing federal role in education
LA School Report | February 27, 2015
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The Los Angeles Times | By Teresa Watanabe
California may be a blue state, but a Republican-led effort to scale back federal intervention in educational reform is drawing support here.
As the House of Representatives moves to vote this week on reauthorizing a 50-year-old education reform law, Republicans are pushing to sharply curtail what they see as federal overreach in prescribing testing, setting achievement goals and imposing sanctions on schools that fail to improve. Instead, the House bill would shift authority for such decisions to states and school districts.
And that suits many in California just fine.
That’s because California has outpaced the nation in developing its own reform measures, including a pioneering school finance system that gives more money to needy students and an effort underway to craft a more complex measure of achievement than simply test scores. The federal prescriptions, many say, too often have interfered with California’s approach.
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